Abstract

 
 
 Following Confederation, Canada was deemed a Dominion and provided with sufficient powers to conduct its own affairs. But the de facto experience was that when its affairs crossed international borders, Imperial preferences took precedence and Dominion reverted to colony. The arena of copyright was no exception.
 American publishers had captured the Canadian reading market through both piracy and private arrangements with British copyright owners. The Canadian government tried to regain its market through an innovative measure which would provide compensation to foreign copyright owners and foster Canadian publishers and authors. That proposal was firmly denied by Britain; it sought instead to hold Canada to the role of customs officer with respect to the duties owed for unauthorized American reprints circulating in the colony. This historic fact is not in doubt; but a study from the perspective of British authors, largely through the journal of the Society of Authors (U.K.), offers insight into these nineteenth-century events. Intriguingly, British authors had shown an intelligent awareness of the difficulties surrounding reading in the colonies and, both implicitly and explicitly, gave some support for Canada’s proposal. However, stronger voices from within the British publishing sector ensured that copyright remained bound by tradition.
 
 
Highlights
It is time that Canadian publishers came over to England and contracted direct with English authors
Irony abounds; when Canadian publishers had advocated for such arrangements in the nineteenth century, British authors and their representative publishers had worked diligently to curtail that very engagement, all under the auspices of respecting copyright
The bitterness felt by the authors with respect to American tendencies to help themselves to foreign books,[8] together with the Society’s ideological underpinnings that copyright is a sacred form of property, enabled British publishers to emphasize that Canada’s proposal was an affront to all authors, and that both Empire and the structure of copyright were best governed by tradition
Summary
It is time that Canadian publishers came over to England and contracted direct with English authors. This personal intercourse between author and publisher would, no doubt, stimulate the latter to greater efforts in order to obtain sales more adequate to the size of the population of Canada than the author obtains under the present arrangement.[1]. Both and they signal a desire for engagement between Canadian publishers and British authors. Irony abounds; when Canadian publishers had advocated for such arrangements in the nineteenth century, British authors and their representative publishers had worked diligently to curtail that very engagement, all under the auspices of respecting copyright
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